The article is casting them in a needlessly antagonistic light. The "more water then..." claim is sourced from this (far superior) article [1], which makes clear that for one, it's saying more water than the houses in LA, not the city (residential use seems to be approx 2x commercial use), and for two this is for every farm these people own in CA, not just the pistachios. So that includes POM Pomegranate juice, Wonderful Pistachios, Cuties Clementines, and some almonds. Indeed, the owner of the second largest produce company in America might be expected to use water on the same level as the residents of the second largest city in America.
That's not to say they're free from ridicule: one particularly damning tidbit in the article linked below outlines a plan by which they bought water from the state for pennies on the dollar then sold it back to the taxpayers at a massive profit. Anyone paying water bills or taxes in CA could find just cause to be upset about that.
At a certain point though, I’m inclined to point my finger at the state for signing terrible business deals. Like, the 1995 water deal was so staggeringly poorly negotiated by the state that I find it hard to get too mad at the farmers that took them up on their giveaway.
The history of CA is a history of sleazy backroom water rights deals. At any point in history one could pretty accurately make the claim that "they" were conspiring against "us" to redirect the allocations of water.
Certainly don't make the mistake of separating the state from the corporations and their lobbies when assigning blame.
There's an apocryphal Mark Twain quote, that "Whisky is for drinking, and water for fighting over".
That saiod, pistachios, pomegranates etc are high-value crops, not like the alfalfa the Saudis grow using senior water rights and then ship to feed cows in Saudi Arabia.
The big problem is that California is too chicken to flatten the baroque system of senior and junior water rights because of the decades of litigation that would entail, and at the same time agricultural water is heavily subsidized and there are perverse incentives for farmers not to invest into more efficient irrigation schemes, often simply flooding entire fields.
It's really kind of sad that people don't seem to understand this. If these politicians were really so bad at making deals, they wouldn't get elected. They know what they're doing.
It’s not clear to me why this comment thread is ignoring the obvious and repeatedly proven point that such corrupt “deals” are lobbied for and passed for the mutual benefit of the lawmakers and business owners. The only losers are normal citizens.
One party can make a bad deal, but that doesn't mean the other party isn't immoral for taking that deal, especially when it has substantial negative externalities.
No, but leaving your door open with a sign that says “Anything you want, $1” does excuse people ripping you off (which is more or less what happened here, the state traded something very valuable for something comparatively worthless). I’m not saying that the farmers here are saints or anything, but at a certain point it’s at least partially the state’s fault for not trying very hard to protect its own resources.
The Contracts Clause: The Contracts Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 10, Clause 1)
> No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title ...
You could still take it back with eminent domain probably, but would have to compensate I think at current value, not at bad negotiated value from some time ago.
Unrelated but reminded me of the time in SF when we had the big water conservation push and you had to ask to get a glass of water refilled and signs were printed inside of restaurants about it. I am ok changing ways and behind conserving water but it was amusing because in my head I thought surely the delta of doing this is not even measurable.
> I thought surely the delta of doing this is not even measurable.
This is unfortunately the case for most ecological movements. Your paper straw is doing absolutely nothing, but it's easier than doing the thing that would actually reduce your emissions...so people do it and feel good.
I don't know a single person that feels good about paper straws. Rather, I think it's done by legislators to fake doing something, ironically making the world worse than not doing anything at all.
Actually the original ban proposal in the EU was on single-use plastics. As in... all of them.
Then the industry jumped on it, threw fudge online, lobbied it to death. In the end the actual proposal that was passed had so many exceptions it became just a ban on plastic straws, q-tips, and forks pretty much.
Nestle, Coco-Cola, Unilever, P&G opened a bottle of champagne and refocused on their quarterly reports.
I'd agree with first sentence. But yeah its a low hanging fruit that's too low and its microscopic, so doesn't solve even 0.0001% of the overall problem. I think what irks most people is that its given disproportionate PR like we're almost fixing climate crisis, when we are actually still pretty much in free fall.
I'm pretty sure there's no legislation that mandates paper straws (I could be wrong here). Legislation bans straws made from non-decomposable single-use materials. There are much better materials than paper, that aren't even particularly expensive (compostable plastics). My suspicion is the paper straws were a product of the plastics industry to try and make it unpopular to pass environmental regulations.
My country started charging $0.12 for plastic bags at the store as an environmental push. In a few years its now $0.36.
Not sure why the environmental push had to become a profit center, kind of feel we could have just switched the bags to paper and charged no one if it were truly about the environment.
I don't know of a single person that feels good about cargo ships burning bunker fuel.
But it seems like a small group of people is able to sway the policy.
A few activists can make us all use paper straws, and a few rich shipping companies can prevent us all from switching to cleaner fuels for prime cargo movers.
Why have democracies become tyrannies of minorities?
Paper straws definitely have value as one part of McDonald's overall change (at least at locations near me) to make 100% of their packaging paper. Unless you order ketchup -- and this must be deliberately ordered -- that comes in a little plastic cup, 100% of what is left on your tray after eating is paper, which can then go straight into a segregated paper recycling chain.
I think its the wrong kind of marketing awareness though. The individuals that feel good about it are already conserving water. The individuals that are not as aware by choice or ignorance are probably going to get upset by a no refill policy. There are better ways to raise awareness in my opinion.
I don't disagree on the surface but similar to optimizing a codebase I like to dive into the biggest issues first and work my way down. Perhaps focusing on a glass of drinking water is the best use of resources and energy but in my worldview there are much better efforts. The glass of water at best makes some feel good and others frustrated. I would rather edge the frustrated group into a middle ground
Those are self-promoting filmmakers, not protestors.
edit: The OP article is a submarine movie promotion, and not subtle about it. That ersatz protest was clearly staged for this article—it's "protesting" a basically empty room, and the photography credit is the author of the OP news story/film promotion.
It's bizarre to me that as a society we can be aware of these kinds of destructive, wasteful practices but we still seem to have our hands tied with regard to putting an end to them.
I don't know how we explain our inaction on all manner of things like this to future generations.
One of the people involved in the film this is related to (Pistachio Wars) is Yasha Levine, whose book about the history of the Internet, Surveillance Valley, is excellent (if controversial!).
It makes perfect sense that the world's largest producer of pistachios and almonds uses a lot of water.
What doesn't make sense is using water to grow lower-value crops like alfalfa for cattle to eat in the California and Arizona desert.
But, I'm not an agricultural expert. The point is that when we are running short of water, we should raise the price for it, and let the market decide. Right now normal people pay far more for water in California than agricultural users. Stop distorting this market, move the agricultural price of water even just a bit closer to the residential price, and the water shortage will go away as the most wasteful farms change their ways.
Seems pretty cheap to me all things considered, and that's with a tiny fraction of a fraction of the world population using it. Imagine if even 1% of the world used this type of technology, how much better it would get. I'd imagine the regulatory delay and corruption to be more impactful in California than the technology itself.
It doesn’t seem like an outrage to me that agriculture uses more water than the cities they feed. It’s actually more accurate to think of the water used in agriculture as an externalized cost of the city. Of course food production uses more water than washing and drinking. That is the case in almost all circumstances.
Now, whether we should be growing luxury crops in water constrained regions, that might be a better discussion to have, but the nature of global trade demands centralized production for the needed economy of scale.
I am very much in favor of a revamp of the unnecessary movement of goods where local production could suffice, but the reality of that concept at scale is a much more constrained, regional marketplace rather than the global bazaar we currently expect and enjoy.
This really seems like a self promoting drive-by on a farm that makes an effort to contribute to their communities in lasting ways, while ignoring the real issue which is overpopulation of areas that can only support sparse populations.
As long as humans need to eat, it’s hard to justify the position that farm usage of water unduly impacts the needs of cities. It’s disingenuous. It’s like saying that breathing uses too much oxygen in a crowded room- maybe resident density, not breathing, is the problem.
California is the worst about water. When I was a kid, some turd would be lecturing me on not flushing every time and taking shorter showers while the school turned a giant grass field into a swamp every morning.
California is obsessed with watering millions of acres of grass for no apparent reason. They will water golf courses, yards around city buildings, artificial lakes, non-native tropical plants, and cemeteries for pennies. Then you get a fine for over-use because your cousin came over for a visit and used a bit extra that month.
It's not only the billionaires in question, it's also a huge amount of legacy farming operations, same goes for Arizona and Colorado.
We're also using a ton of water to grow alfalfa in the same region, and we're not even using that at home, we're selling it to the Saudis and Chinese so they can feed their livestock.
But these guys really need to get their operation taken away from them - their farms use more water than the entire city of LA does? That's wild, and means that we need regulation there.
Can’t we ban growing of these high water crops in areas where there is water shortage? One can happily live without eating pistachios their entire life, no?
Compared to what? Relative to other nuts and seeds? To other common ground crops? To fruits?
I've never heard that pistachios are low water crops and I find that hard to believe. They're one of the highest blue water consumers in their class; water in rivers, lakes and aquifers [1]. Pistachios are not low water. They're drought tolerant and do well in arid climates but to fruit naturally they need a really good year of water. OR irrigation which we've done in abundance.
Thanks for informing me- I confused drought tolerance with not requiring much water for production.
I’d be interested to know how their water usage would compare to staple foods like beans, rice or wheat, that would give a better sense of the relative imprudence of growing pistachios in that area.
Bakersfield, CA averages 6.36" of precipitation per year, Los Banos is 9.48". The Central Valley where much of this is grown is very dry. (Merced + Fresno do a little better being closer to the mountains, but still under 12").
Anyway, the problem isn't so much in an average or good water year but in a bad one. CA is prone to lengthy droughts.
This is in some senses, not that big a problem for growing annual crops - just plant less/don't plant, and if you have to give up on the crop, you at least are only losing that year's crop.
However, this doesn't work for tree nuts.
If the tree isn't watered in the year(s) of drought - and watered significantly more heavily than usual, (because of the drought), the tree dies, and it will take a decade or more for a replacement to start yielding significant amounts of that crop again. That's a much larger loss than a single year's crop.
This makes the almond and pistachio farming a much less flexible form of agriculture in an environment where water availability varies drastically.
They're not supplementing the 12" it needs with another 3"... even in California's droughts they're getting about that much anyway. I'm guessing another "journalist" was confusing almonds and pistachios. You wouldn't happen to be a journalist yourself, would you?
That's not to say they're free from ridicule: one particularly damning tidbit in the article linked below outlines a plan by which they bought water from the state for pennies on the dollar then sold it back to the taxpayers at a massive profit. Anyone paying water bills or taxes in CA could find just cause to be upset about that.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewar...